TL;DR

You can remove NewLine from String in python by using string’sreplace() method.
Syntax:

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final_string=initial_string.replace('\n', '')

We need to preprocess information while working with data to get meaningful insights, one of them is removing stray Newline Characters from a string in Python.

Remove NewLine from String in Python

This Python tutorial demonstrates the use of replace(), strip(), re.sub(), and splitlines() to eliminate newline characters from the specified string.

Use str.replace() to Remove Newline Characters From a Python String

The str.replace() function takes oldvalue and newvalue as function parameters where oldvalue will be replaced by newvalue. For our code, the oldvalue is \n and newvlaue would be a single whitespace.

Note that, the replace() function can also take a count parameter which denotes how many occurrences of oldvalue we want to replace with newvalue.

message = "\n Hi! \n  How are you? \n"
print("Before:" + message)

new_message = message.replace('\n', '')
print("After:" + new_message)

Before:
 Hi! 
  How are you? 


After: Hi!   How are you?

Use str.strip() to Remove Newline Characters From a Python String

The strip() function truncates the trailing newline characters (\n) and white spaces, which means it eliminates newline characters & whitespaces from both ends of the specified string (start and end).

message_one = "\n Hi! How are you? \n"
print("Before:" +  message_one)

new_message_one = message_one.strip()
print("After:" + new_message_one)

Before:
 Hi! How are you? 

After:Hi! How are you?

Remember that the strip() function does not remove whitespaces and newline characters occurring in between the given string. See the following code fence.

message_two = "\n\n Hi! \n  How are you? \n"
print("Before:" + message_two)

new_message_two = message_two.strip()
print("After:" + new_message_two)

Before:

 Hi! 
  How are you? 

After:Hi! 
  How are you?

Removing trailing newline characters and whitespaces is the default behaviour of strip(); otherwise, it can also remove the specified trailing characters, for instance, str.strip('2').

The resulting string returned by strip() depends on what parameters are provided:

• If no parameter is given then it removes trailing whitespaces, and newline characters and return a string without whitespaces, and newline at the start and end of the string. If the specified string does not has any trailing whitespace and newline then, it returns an original string as it is.

• If we specify a character parameter for strip(), it removes them from the start/end of the string and returns the string without those characters. If the specified character parameter is not available at the start/end of the string then we’ll get the original string as it is.

Use str.splitlines() to Remove Newline Characters From a Python String

As we have learned that str.strip() will not remove newline characters that occur somewhere in the string, this is where str.splitlines() comes into the picture and helps us to remove newline characters that occur at the start, end and on random places in a string.

This function splits the specified string into a list. This split happens as soon as the str.splitlines() find a line break. Further, we use the join() method to join all the chunks separated by whitespace.

def func(string):
    return ''.join(string.splitlines())

message = "\n Hi! \n  How are you? \n"
print("Before:", message)
print("After:", func(message))

Before: 
 Hi! 
  How are you? 

After:  Hi!   How are you?

Here, we are getting the advantage of splitlines()‘s default behaviour but we can also pass True or False as a parameter to splitlines() based on whether we want to include line breaks or not.

If yes then, we will specify True as a parameter; otherwise False, which is its default behaviour.

Use re.sub() to Remove Newline Characters From a Python String

We can also truncate newline characters using the regex function, called sub(). To use this function, we will import the re module. In the following code, the re.sub() function takes three parameters:

1. pattern – It is a pattern or string that needs to be replaced.
2. repl – It is a pattern or string with which we will replace the pattern.
3. string– It is a string on which the re.sub() will be executed.

Note that, re.sub() can also take count and flags as parameters which are used to denote the number of replacements and aids to shorten the code respectively.

import re

message = "\n Hi! \n  How are you? \n"
print("Before:" + message)

new_message = re.sub('\n', '', message)
print("After:" + new_message)

Before:
 Hi! 
  How are you? 

After: Hi!   How are you?

Now, what if we have to remove a new line from a list of strings in Python? Let’s see how we can do it in the following section.

Remove Newline from a List of Strings in Python

All the methods that we have learned in this tutorial, can be used to remove newline characters as follows but each will work with its pros and cons. See the following example.

my_list = ["I\n", "want to take the \nbest", "coffee\n\n "]

replace_result = []
sub_result = []
strip_result = []
splitlines_result = []

for sub in my_list:
    replace_result.append(sub.replace("\n", ""))
    sub_result.append(re.sub("\n", "", sub))
    strip_result.append(sub.strip())
    splitlines_result.append(sub.splitlines())

print("New List : " + str(replace_result))
print("New List : " + str(sub_result))
print("New List : " + str(strip_result))
print("New List : " + str(splitlines_result))

New List : ['I', 'want to take the best', 'coffee ']
New List : ['I', 'want to take the best', 'coffee ']
New List : ['I', 'want to take the \nbest', 'coffee']
New List : [['I'], ['want to take the ', 'best'], ['coffee', '', ' ']]

Now, it’s up to you, you can choose any of these approaches based on your project requirements.